This application claims the priority of the filing date of provisional patent application filed on Apr. 26, 2010 under the same title and under the name of the same inventor, Troy W. Livingston.
Medical patient transports (transporters) such as used medical transfer cots, wheel chairs, track mounted wheel chairs, and chairs for transporting a patient from one location to another location are well known in the art. The term “patient” as used herein refers to an injured, disabled or incapacitated person.
Available patient transporters include many forms and reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 7,581,265 issued to Bourgraf et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,962,941 issued to Rembos; U.S. Pat. No. 6,648,343 issued to Way et al and U.S. Pat. No. 7,520,347 issued to Chambliss et al. Also, motor driven transporters, either with loop tracks or multiple wheels, are known for supporting and moving a patient from one location to another.
As will be discussed herein below, Americans are becoming more obese and it is frequently most difficult, if not impossible, for one or two attendants to safely transport a heavy person from one location to another. The attendants who often are emergency medical personnel (EMT), firemen, or nurses have a critical need for equipment to carry or transport injured or disabled persons who may be heavy (more than 350 pounds) from one floor level to another floor level. For instance, if an injured person is in the basement of a house it may be necessary to transport an injured individual up a flight of stairs and to an ambulance for transfer to a hospital. If the injured person is unconscious, he or she must first be strapped onto a long medical back board/spine board in a prone position and then placed on the transporter. The problem may become quite critical if there is a fire in the building and firemen have to quickly move the person out of the building. In the process of transporting an injured person, up a flight of stairs, firemen often incur injury to themselves. As mentioned above, the problem has recently become more critical since the weight of Americans has increased most significantly in recent years. Even persons weighing more than 450 pounds are not too uncommon.
Conversely, transporting an injured person down flights of stairs often becomes an even more critical problem because the EMTs must assure that the transporter on which the injured person is being carried does get out of control and slip or slide down the stairs placing both the injured person and the EMTs in serious physical danger.
Thus, an object of the present invention is to provide a transporter that is manually powered to transport a patient from one location to another such as up and down a flight of stairs, which transporter can be used to transport a patient who may be obese, and which transporter can be normally operated as few as two attendants. The transporter can be configured as a chair or to support a medical long back board (spine board) on which a patient can be carried in a prone position from one location to another.